We all know the drill to make pasta. Bring the water to a boil. Drop the pasta in. Boil 8-10 minutes. . . and hope it doesn’t boil over.
What if I told you there was an easier way? One that uses less electricity? That never boils over? And that puts less heat into your house on those hot summer days?
Just fill your pot up with cold water and drop the pasta in. That’s right–I said to add the pasta to the cold water.
Put the lid on, put the pot on the burner and bring the water/pasta to a boil.
As soon as it reaches a boil, turn off the burner, move the pot off of it and let it sit, covered for 10 minutes. By skipping the additional 8-10 minutes of boiling time you are conserving energy as well as adding less heat to your kitchen (something that becomes important in my un-airconditioned home during the summer)
When you first take the pot it off the burner your pasta will still look uncooked, like this:
But after 10 minutes you will have perfectly cooked noodles!
Drain and enjoy!
This would be great here in AZ for the summer for sure! I foresee making it when you are camping too!
What a wonderful way to cook pasta! Even though we have A/C here in Florida, we don’t like to heat up the house and make A/C work any harder. Thanks for this tip!
This post is so full of AWESOME, I can hardly stand it! I’m going to try this with rice pasta and I’ll let you know how it goes!
Thanks very much for the extremely useful tip! 🙂
So glad you all have found this useful!
I tried cooking the pasta this way on Sunday and I found that a lot of pasta stuck to the bottom of the pot, even though I stirred it a few times after I took it off the heat. Also, it was very mushy. What did I do wrong? Should I have stirred it more? The pasta was the tubetinni which is the small tubular pasta.
Oh I’m so sorry Anne! I really hate it when something I suggest doesn’t work out for folks. I’ve done this with spaghetti, elbow macaroni and rotini (the spirals) with no issues. Occasionally a couple stick to the bottom but come up pretty easily with a bit of stirring with a wooden spoon.
It sounds like your pasta is smaller-maybe that made it cook more quickly (and therefore get mushy). If you really want to use this method with those noodles I’d suggest trying it the next time and checking it every couple of minutes until it’s done–they you’ll know how long that pasta takes.
I’d also suggest using plenty of water–maybe it would stick less if the pasta had more “room”?
Try putting a few drops of oil in the water before you add the pasta-just a bit-this won’t add extra calories and will help the pasta not to stick as much.